


Salvation for the Damned

by LadyFangs



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: hurt/comfort/ betrayal, reassurance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 18:41:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15712866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyFangs/pseuds/LadyFangs
Summary: They have only a few things in common.They are both Starfleet officers.And they've both been tricked and hurt by Gabriel Lorca.





	Salvation for the Damned

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [radioactive_violet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/radioactive_violet/pseuds/radioactive_violet) in the [july2018](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/july2018) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Katrina and Ellen talking about how Mirror!Lorca tricked and hurt them. Whether or not it leads to anything romantic or sexual is up to you.

**Salvation for the Damned**

 

Katrina examines the young lieutenant seated before her.

Ellen Landry. A disciplinary record longer than her commendations, above-average performance on every test, excellent in battle and tactical proficiency, but a chip bigger than Everest on her shoulder. The admiral leans forward.

“Why’d you help him?”

“Because he was different,” Landry visibly tenses, her shoulders squared, back straight. There’s something high- strung about her, defiant—it’s the way they watch each other warily. Defensively. This is a woman who has seen war and death and what chills Katrina—apparently enjoys it.  But there’s also something else, in the way Landry eyes the door, as if expecting a ghost or shadow to appear at any moment.

They’ve survived the war. But every Starfleet officer carries with them the often-terrible choices they were forced to make in order to do so. Landry is no different. Maybe even more so. Katrina wonders if the Lieutenant is aware of what she knows, and how.

 Gabriel Lorca, former commander of the USS Discovery, General Gabriel Lorca of the ISS Buran, was a rat bastard indeed.

“Different how?” Katrina asks, changing her approach, leaning back in a manner non-threatening. Landry is on edge, she can tell. Nervous. She’s still too tense. Too tight. Lips pressed together, hands stilled firmly on her thighs.

“Is this a formal inquiry?”

“Does it need to be?”

They study each other, each searching for an in—for Landry, a sign that it can be okay, that she won’t be hung out to dry, painted as a conspirator, a traitor a…mutineer. The last word of the thought makes her shudder as she recalls vividly, the day Michael Burnham set foot upon discovery. How she’d sneered at the woman, despised her even for a choice that, only in hindsight, has Landry come to begrudgingly understand and even to…respect. But Michael’s presence disrupted her space, jeopardized Landry’s own position—in more ways than she cares to think of at the moment. For even that, is a far more difficult thing to process, than –

She would rather go blind.

Funny, Ellen thinks, the sentiment. She can’t un-see what she has, cannot undo what she’s done, but if she ever got the chance—she knows she never would have allowed herself to fall into his bed.

Because that is where it all began, of course. In Gabriel Lorca’s bed.

From the start—the way he looked at her, as if she were food and he was starving, the way he touched her—soft brushes of his hand against hers, and ultimately…his question…of what she wanted…how she felt…what she thought—through Gabriel Lorca, Ellen Landry got something she never had before. Validation.

Confirmation that her views of Starfleet, of the Federation—they weren’t just some delusion of a jaded, paranoid warmongering officer with delusions of grandeur—that she was right to worry. Right to argue against docility, right to advocate for stronger defenses. Her “strike first ask questions later” attitude intrigued him, and one night, alone in his quarters, he’d told her, “you’re different. I like that.”

Landry saw threats everywhere. It was how and why she chose security as her field. While her classmates laughed at her, she worked. Analyzing systems, mapping corridors and pathways. Ways in an out—vulnerabilities, as if stationing Starfleet Headquarters on an island wasn’t a big one itself.

But security was for the jocks, the people who didn’t care to think, just do. For those who couldn’t “make it” in the hard sciences. The redshirts. The expendables. She quickly proved she wasn’t one of them.

That night Lorca asked where she was from, a stupid question, really, her file listed her birthplace as Earth, and that was true. But what was not in her file, was that when she was still a child, her parents left Earth to help settle one of the outlying colonies, near the treaty zone with Romulus. What her file didn’t say, was how the Federation quickly forgot about their colony and that the Romulans didn’t take kindly to a few thousand humans knocking on their front door.

 The file only read, “parents deceased” and didn’t talk about the how—executed in front of her with more than 10 other families, the children left alive as witnesses to the “power and generosity of the Romulan Empire.”

For the next five years, Landry and those left alive waged a war for their colony with no Federation help, no Starfleet protection or reinforcement. They fought, and bombed, and ran, and killed. Killing, something her soft and brainwashed Starfleet colleagues couldn’t understand. Killing was anathema to them. They didn’t know what it was like to die for a believe, to kill to live, to struggle, to starve to…

She was mortified when her Captain leaned over and wiped a tear from her cheek. Never had she been so open, so vulnerable so…

A piece of hair had fallen from her no longer neat pony tail as she told him her truth, and he’d reached around to gently brushing it behind her ear with the back of his hand in a way that felt like a kiss. And he was so close…she could feel the warmth of his breath, could only gaze at his lips, wondering in the moment whether she would. Whether he would…how it would feel if he…

Kissed her.

 “Don’t let them destroy you,” he’d whispered in her ear, the heat of his cheek against hers. “You’re perfect as you are.”

In that moment she knew she would do anything, ANYTHING, for her captain. Finally, a person she could give her all to, a cause worth dying for—and that night as she let him strip her, he gave Landry something she never had before. Control. She didn’t know how to make love. Didn’t want that. And he could tell.

So he fucked her. He fucked her hard, going so deep it made her scream but she liked the pain. Loved it when he pinned her down, loved it when he let her ride him, grinding out her pleasure on his lap. She showed him she was tough—not like the others—that she could take what he wanted to give, and give alike.

“I would have died for him,” she says now, looking at Admiral Cornwell, daring this woman to say something—to challenge her, to change her mind. To deny her this comfort.

“Do you think he would have died for you?”

_We wear the mask that grins and lies,_

_It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes…_

A direct shot. Cornwell watches as Landry’s face crumbles, her air of bravado evaporates, the wall comes down, until the soldier is defeated, and only the woman remains. A tired, fragile woman. One who put her trust in the wrong person. A person who lied to her. Deceived her. Used her. And that may be the worst offense of all.

 “I’m sorry, Commander.”

 “I don’t want your pity.” Because to be pitied is to be weak. To Landry, the admiral’s sentiment doesn’t feel sincere. It feels like she’s being led into a trap, that this woman is trying to get under her skin, and it galls her because she feels it is working. She feels the fallen woman. The scapegoat. And she is none of that, and will not allow herself to be blamed for wrongs she didn’t do.

 Katrina sits back and observers quietly.

 Gabriel had that effect on people. He was charismatic, charming, inspiring loyalty and dedication in his crew. Both Lorca’s it would seem, judging from Ellen Landry. She feels her stomach churn and swallows back the taste at the back of her throat. It happens a lot now, when she thinks of Gabriel. It didn’t before though. Before, she would relish the gentle tease of his kisses, the slightly sweetness of his mouth from his favorite whisky. She should have known immediately it wasn’t him.

 He was too rough, to brisk, too impatient—more concerned with his pleasure than hers. It was the first time she’d ever felt…used.

 “It wasn’t just you, Ellen,” Katrina says, despite her own misgivings she understands. Landry is hurting, her hostility and defiance an act of self-preservation—an attempt to keep intact what little dignity she feels she has left, after that man stripped everything else away.

 “What are you talking about?” Landry asks, the words slightly halting, higher-pitched.

 “I think you know.”

 Landry stares at Admiral Cornwell a moment, searching for any hint of subterfuge, but to her surprise, there is none. Admiral Cornwell is older, fine lines around her eyes which appear tired, her slender mouth turned down on the sides, and Landry realizes for the first time, that maybe Cornwell isn’t trying to trap her. That maybe, just maybe…

 “How do you move on?” She asks, allowing herself a moment of vulnerability. Even now Gabriel Lorca still holds her. Even now, when she sleeps, she feels him, when she wakes, she thinks she sees him. And when she moves…he’s there behind her.

 “You said you’d die for him,” Cornwell says, reiterating Landry’s words, remembering a time when she felt something similar, when her heart and his beat together, when they breathed together, loved together…when Gabriel Lorca was her everything. Unhealthy, for a person to be your all, no matter the depth of that love.

“But you didn’t,” she continues reaching across the table that separates the two women, and placing a hand on Landry’s.

 “You did the right thing,” Cornwell says. “You chose to go on. You chose to survive. You chose to live…and so did I. You loved yourself more. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

 

 

 


End file.
